Showtime

Okie, it took me a while but I've finally uploaded the photos that I took at the Perth Royal Show.
Once again, as usual, I apologise to Acci in advance for the big photo post ;-)

Ok, so the day didn't get off to a great start. Barb turns up at my house absolutely covered from head to toe in iced-coffee and in a very foul mood. Turns out Mikey had passed her the drink in the car and accidentally squeezed the carton a little too much, covering Barb and her nice white shirt. I had a spare shirt that Barb could wear though so it all got sorted in the end.
It took us a little while to transfer Caleb and Wil into my car along with the mountain of stuff required when taking children out for a full day but we still left my house at about the time we had planned.

Of course, I had completely forgotten that traffic can be a bitch in the morning. Especially through the tunnel.
Why the heck did I go through the tunnel? About half way through, doing 15kms an hour, the thought struck me that there is a much easier, and less congested way to get to Thomas road and that would be the way I go to soccer twice a week. Of course there was nothing I could do about it then but I filed that thought away in my head for the trip home.

So we reached the show grounds and paid ten bucks for some RSL guy to direct me to park on top of the highest curb he could find. I cringed when I saw where he was pointing and then winced when the bottom of my car thunked down on the curb and then glared when he said 'Come on love, just drive up, it's not hard.' I also made some retort about it not being his car so he can damned well wait but I'm not sure if he heard that part...

After we'd unloaded the contents of the car into the double stroller we headed off to get tickets, hoping the rest of the day would kick off to a slightly better start. It's always the way though with the show, it's so busy and packed and stressful that there's bound to be some hiccups.
Mum messaged us saying she wasn't far away and so once we were in the grounds we headed off to the Police Pavilion to get some Lost Children stickers for the kids. It wasn't too long afterwards that Mum, Jo, Darce and Chiara turned up and so we could finally get down to business.

This is Darcie and the boys. Caleb is a little older so he wasn't too bad walking around but the safest thing to do with Wil was keep him strapped in the stroller. He has a very bad habit of just running off (I guess he's at that age) and none of us really wanted to lose him

Chiara, all sunscreened up and ready to go.

Darcie, in her pink cargo pants, ready for action.

After we left the Police Pavilion we got down the really important stuff - kiddie rides!
The first thing the kids went on was the Merry-go-round. It was actually a really nice one, the horses were lovely and decorated and it was really colourful.

Wil really liked the horses when they were just standing still but as soon as it started to move he started screaming.

The whole lead up to the show all Caleb wanted to do was have a pony ride. This was the closest he got but that didn't seem to bother him at all.

Darcie doesn't like riding on the horsies but she was more than happy to go on the big pink bench.

Chiara however loved the horsies.

A close up of one of the horses.

And they're off!

After the Merry-go-round it was onto the bumper boats.
Caleb had fun crashing into other kids.

Chiara on the lookout for her brother. He's behind you!

While most of the kids just randomly floated about, Darcie figured out how to make hers accelerate and so she zoomed around the pool, changing directions and going from one end to the other.

Darce and Chiara after a collision.

Christian's Aunt and Uncle show their Suffolk's at the show and so after the kiddie rides we headed down to say hello. Only Ed was there as Sue was coming down later on for judging but it was nice to see him again.
Their sheep really seemed to like me, I spent ten minutes just scratching the heads of two of them.
This was one of them. He was also very interested in the camera.

We then had a look at some of the other sheep. And we found this one.
Biggest fucking sheep ever!

Not quite what Mother Nature intended, I'm sure.

Fluro sheep!

He he, the drapes match the carpet...

After the sheep, the kids wanted to get some show bags and so we headed down through sideshow alley to get to the show bag stalls on the other side. Fighting through the crowds with a double stroller isn't the easiest thing in the world but we managed it in the end. It didn't help that I was stopping every five seconds to snap away at random crap.
Like this.

Gotta get the treasure, gotta get the treasure, gotta get the treasure, gotta get the treasure...

After we'd loaded the stroller up with show bags we headed into the baby animals pavilion to have a looksie.
Now, this place is always packed with kids, but it wasn't too bad that day. So I managed to get close enough to take a few photos.
Emu chicks! How cute! They were still in their incubator and there were still several eggs still to hatch.

Goat kid. I'm king of the mountian!

I have no idea what the hell this is (Five hugs to anyone who can tell me!) but I really hope it's not a baby. Because it was fucking HUGE! As in taller than me. And if that was a baby, I really don't want to see what mummy looks like!

After the baby animals it was about time for lunch so we made our way down to the arena and managed to snag a place in some shade.
I made sure to get a photo of Mum for Boo and Mouse, although it did kind of surprise her.

Gah, it's a Nettie!

While we were having lunch we watched some stunt drivers do some jumps on motorbikes. I took about ten pics but didn't want to bore you with all of them so here's just one.

We headed off for more kiddie rides and on the way I found this sculpture. It was really cool and just really really random. It was just sitting in a little niche just out of the way...

Some of the skulls had writing on them but I didn't have a chance to see what it said exactly as I had to hurry to catch up with the others.

On the way to the rides we passed these really creepy performers. Everyone was dead still except for the guy in the middle and he would call out these lines of dialogue and one by one each gypsie would change positions and then freeze again.

Don't know why, but they just freaked me out a bit.

While the kids went on more rides I went over the check out the dogs. There must have been judging on at that time though as the pavilion was almost empty.
Apart from these two.

I'm tired and wanna go home!

I passed these weird looking hairy snail things on the way back to Kiddie Land. I'm not really sure what they were meant to be...

The eyes blinked and the mouth would open and snap at people and they left trails of slime behind them. And the people on their backs reminded me of the Specks from Robin Hobb's latest series.

This is quite a crappy photo but it's showing Chiara and Caleb getting strapped into the dragon rollercoaster.

Chiara loved it but Caleb spent the whole ride with his eyes squeezed shut and his head down.

Mum took Wil for a walk around and figured he'd be ok to go on a couple of the rides. So here they are in the helicopter ride.

Say hello Wil!
People seem to have issues figuring out how to focus my camera which can be a good thing as most photos of me tend to be blurry but I can live with that :)
We didn't hang about too much longer after that. Jo and I went down to sideshow alley and went on a couple of rides which was fun. It was kind of a new experience for me in some ways. I never realised just how much of a difference 13 kilos can make! I was thrown around a lot more that before and it's quite a bit scarier when you're loose in the harness!
We also called in at the rice writing stand and I got a pendant with my name on a piece of rice. Jo picked up one for Darcie too because Darce gets upset that you can never get stuff with her name on it.

We headed home and of course we managed to get stuck in peak hour traffic. Hurrah. It took us over an hour to get home and I must say, my clutch foot was killing me!

No matter how much fun you have at the show, it's always good to get home and I was so tired. Although I was pleasantly surprised to find that I didn't get too sunburnt. A first for me!

And that's our day at the show.